Just One Look

by Mary McBride

  Joe thought back to that afternoon when the captain had sat in his car in Sara’s driveway and blipped the siren to get Joe’s attention. It hadn’t struck him as particularly odd that Frank hadn’t come to the door. The guy had been mad as hell, too furious to show that face to a civilian. It was his fury he had been hiding from Sara. Not his face. Wasn’t it?

  “What about the time you took me to the station for that lineup?” she asked. “Wasn’t your captain supposed to be there and then didn’t show up for some unaccountable reason? Huh? Why was that, Joe? Do you think maybe he didn’t want me to see him? And what about—”

  Joe held up his hand to silence her. He needed to think, but he couldn’t while Sara was flapping around the bedroom, babbling at ninety miles an hour. When she opened her mouth to speak again, he silenced her with a gruff, “Be quiet.”

  It was like trying to put together the pieces of a warped puzzle. Nothing fit quite right. But still...

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “Do you believe me?” Sara asked almost breathlessly while she stared at him, studying his face. “You do believe me, don’t you? You have to believe me, Joe.”

  He wasn’t sure. How could he be sure? My God. It was too damned outlandish. Too twisted.

  “Pack a bag,” he said. “For a day or two.”

  “But...”

  “Don’t argue with me, Sara. Just do it. I’m getting you out of here. Now.”

  Chapter 12

  “Do not panic,” Sara commanded her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Right. She might just as well have ordered the sun to come up in the west, she thought dismally. Already, her mouth was dry and her hands were wet and her heart was beating so hard she feared it might break a rib.

  “Just ignore it,” she told herself as she grabbed her mascara, dropped it into her cosmetics bag, then carried it to the open suitcase on her bed.

  Joe was on the phone in the bedroom across the hall, presumably because he didn’t want to frighten Sara with whatever gory details he was discussing with his partner. Every once in a while a not-so-muted expletive would drift in her direction, leading her to assume that Sergeant Maggie O’Connor was as skeptical as Joe had been at first. Who wouldn’t be? she wondered. A witness who’d only been able to draw a blank thus far had suddenly drawn a detailed portrait of the Ripper, and he’d turned out to be none other than their captain.

  Maybe she was wrong. Maybe her mind was playing some bizarre trick on her. Maybe she should just meander across the hall, laugh and say, “Just kidding,” then come back and unpack this dratted suitcase. She wouldn’t have to go anywhere, and her panic would subside. Maybe...

  “You ready?” Joe’s voice came from the doorway.

  “No,” she answered shakily. “Yes. I don’t know. Maybe you ought to knock me out. You know. Just punch out my lights, put me in the trunk of your car and bring me to whenever we get where we’re going.”

  “That’s Plan B.” He was standing directly behind her. His arms slid around her waist, and his cheek pressed against hers. “You’ll be fine. You’ll be safe. I promise. Jeez, baby. Your heart’s beating like a jackhammer.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She let out a long sigh. “What a wimp, huh?”

  “I didn’t say that.” His arms tightened. “Actually, I think you’re one very gutsy lady, if you want to know the truth. A lot of women would have fallen apart under similar circumstances, you know. With the Ripper and all.”

  “That’s probably because I really didn’t believe he existed until I saw that face awhile ago. You do believe me, don’t you?”

  He was silent a moment. When he did speak, his voice was more serious, more businesslike than usual. It was Decker’s cop voice. “It’s a real stretch, Sara. A real stretch. But Maggie and I are going to do some checking tonight. I’ve got to tell you, though, that both of us hope you’re wrong. In the meantime we’ll just keep you where nobody at the department knows. Just in case.”

  “Let me just toss a few more things in my bag, and I’ll be ready.”

  “A few more things?” He stepped away, then gestured to her brimming suitcase. “We’re only going to a hotel for a night or two. You look like you’re packing for a three-month cruise.”

  “Humor me, Decker,” she said. “And just be glad I’m not taking the kitchen sink, all right?”

  He laughed. “Hey, if that would make this any easier for you, babe, I’d tear it out of the wall myself. I’ll give you five more minutes, then we’re out of here. With or without the sink.”

  The lobby of the Jefferson Hotel was packed with conventioneers, but because of the late hour, the long, marble-fronted check-in counter was deserted when Joe and Sara arrived. He’d taken a circuitous route from her house, doubling back once to make sure nobody was following them.

  He put her heavy suitcase down with a thud, fairly certain she had snuck in the kitchen sink and maybe even the bathtub while he wasn’t looking. No wonder she never went anywhere. The packing alone was enough to wear anybody out, not to mention trying to maneuver the huge suitcase with its loose handle and wobbly wheels. He’d wound up carrying the sucker all the way from the third level of the parking garage.

  Beside him, Sara looked pale and anxious, if not downright panicky. She seemed to be measuring her breathing, trying her best not to scream or take off toward the front door of the hotel. He looped an arm around her shoulder and drew her closer against him. “We’ll be upstairs in a jiffy,” he said. If the damn clerk ever decided to show his face.

  She swallowed audibly and leaned closer against him. “What if they don’t have a room?”

  “They always have a room. Trust me.”

  “It’s awfully crowded.” She gazed warily around at the conventioneers as if any one of them might suddenly decide to accost her, as if the Ripper himself might be lurking in their midst.

  As if her nervousness were contagious, Joe found himself scanning face after face in the crowd, almost praying he didn’t see a familiar one.

  Sara leaned harder against him. “Joe, maybe we should just—”

  “May I help you?”

  The clerk had appeared on the other side of the counter, looking far more resentful than helpful. Joe was tempted to flash his badge in the guy’s face to put him on notice, but he restrained himself. The less attention they attracted, the better off Sara would be.

  “We’d like a room,” he said, “for two nights.”

  The clerk frowned at a monitor while he punched several keys. “Looks like there’s nothing avail—Oh, wait. No. Sorry. All I’ve got left is the Terrace Suite.”

  “We’ll take it.”

  A decided smirk slid across the young man’s lips. “That’s six seventy-five a day, sir.” His gaze flitted from Joe’s worn leather jacket to Sara’s pale, panicstricken face, then back to Joe. “Plus tax.”

  “We’ll take it.” Asshole. Joe slapped a platinum credit card on the marble counter.

  “Fine, Mr....” No longer smirking, the clerk read the card. “Mr. Savona. This will take only a minute or two.”

  After the man had turned and disappeared through a door, Sara nudged an elbow into Joe’s side. “Mr. Savona?”

  “My brother-in-law. I’ve got an extra card of his for emergencies.”

  She smiled a wobbly smile. “Like when you’re stashing witnesses.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The clerk emerged, paperwork in hand. He slid a pen across the counter. “If you’ll just sign here, Mr. Savona, I’ll have someone show you up to the suite.”

  Joe slashed his brother-in-law’s name across the receipt, imagining the look on Rudy’s face when he opened his bill next month, vowing to call him in advance so Edie’s brother didn’t have a coronary. “Just give me the key,” he told the clerk. “We’ll find it ourselves.”

  Then, with Sara’s clammy hand in his right and her elephantine bag in his left, he hustled her across the lobby, wedging through shoulders and defle
cting elbows, toward the bank of elevators on the north side.

  “You’re doing great,” he told her as he hit the up arrow.

  She offered him a tight-lipped smile in response, then didn’t say a word as the elevator whisked them to the twentieth floor. The Terrace Suite turned out to be about half a mile down the corridor, which was good in Joe’s opinion. They’d be harder to sneak up on. And the suite was adjacent to the fire stairs, which he devoutly hoped they’d never have to use in case of fire or anything else. He slid the plastic key in the lock, waited for the green light, then opened the door.

  “After you, Mrs. Savona,” he said.

  He followed her in, wrestled the suitcase onto a rickety wooden rack, then took a look around the sitting room portion of the suite. Couch. Club chair. A desk too dainty to do any real work on. “Not much for nearly seven hundred bucks a night.”

  Sara had already wandered into the bedroom, so he did the same, spying the usual armoire to disguise the television, the ubiquitous double dresser and the bed. One. Huge. Round, for God’s sake.

  “Must be the honeymoon suite,” Sara said, pointing at what looked like half an acre of beveled mirror overhead.

  “Make you nervous?” he asked.

  She laughed. “It makes me wish I’d lost those ten pounds I’ve been promising to lose for the past two years.”

  Joe sighed. “I hate to waste a good mirror, but I don’t think we’re going to be getting any sleep tonight. Maggie’ll be here as soon as I call her with our room number.”

  “Maggie?”

  “She’s bringing the captain’s desk calendar so we can compare dates with the Ripper’s activities. But she has to have it back on Frank’s desk before he comes in tomorrow morning, so we’ll have to copy any pages that look promising.”

  “Do you think you’ll find anything there?” she asked. “In a calendar that sits right out in the open like that?”

  “I don’t know, babe. But it’s a place to start.”

  After Maggie arrived with the calendar, they ordered a pot of coffee from room service and divided the pages three ways, with Sara getting the months when the Ripper hadn’t murdered anyone. This past year he had struck five times—twice in January, then in April, September and most recently in November, when he’d killed the woman in the Land Cruiser two weeks before.

  By the time Sara was up to the second week of February, she felt she already had a handle on Frank Cobble’s personality. He was cheap, obsessive, and he made more dentist appointments than anyone she’d ever known.

  “This guy is really weird,” she said, glancing up from one of the three-by-five pages filled with tiny, perfect letters, all of them printed in blue-black ink.

  “No kidding,” Joe and Maggie said in unison, both of them staring intently at their pages.

  Like the detectives, Sara wasn’t expecting to see anything quite as obvious as Murder A Female noted at midnight on any of her pages, but she hoped she might at least discover some kind of pattern in the captain’s behavior.

  “Who’s Ellen?” she asked when she came across a note to order flowers on February twenty-fifth.

  “Mrs. Cobble,” Maggie told her, adding under her breath, “the poor thing.”

  “Who’s F.J.?”

  “Probably Frank Junior,” Joe said. “I’ve got some notes here to write F.J.’s tuition check, buy F.J.’s airline ticket, stuff like that.”

  “Tuition?” Maggie clucked her tongue. “The guy’s—what?—thirty and he’s still in school?”

  “Looks like it,” Joe said. “You putting anything together, Mag?”

  The sergeant shook her head, then sighed. “Not yet. You?”

  “Nope.”

  Five hours and one more pot of coffee later, after checking, rechecking and cross-checking dates and data, none of them had come up with a single thing that linked Frank Cobble to any of the Ripper’s crimes. The worst thing they had found was a reminder the captain had written on July nineteenth. Reprimand Decker!!! In the eleven months between January and November, those were the only exclamation points the man had penned.

  It was almost six o’clock in the morning when; exhausted and bleary-eyed, they decided to call it quits.

  Maggie carefully collated the calendar pages, making sure they were in order before she anchored them on their metal rings. “I’m out of here,” she said. “I’ll sneak this back on Cobble’s desk. What do you want to do next, partner?”

  Joe yawned, then stretched his arms over his head. “Sleep,” he said. “Then maybe I’ll go into the shop in a few hours and have a quiet little conversation with the boss. Maybe tell him that our witness finally came up with a solid ID and see if he twitches.”

  He walked Maggie to the door, the two of them with their heads together, whispering. Probably about her, Sara thought. Having the calendar come up empty hadn’t done a lot for her confidence. Frank Cobble didn’t come off as a vicious murderer on those pages, but rather a man who dotted all his Is, crossed all his Ts, and sent his wife flowers for her birthday.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” she said after Joe closed and locked the door.

  “Maybe.”

  He sounded as tired as he looked. His hair was rumpled from raking his fingers through it in frustration. His eyelids were at half-mast and his jaw was shaded with whiskers. Reaching for her hand, he said, “I don’t even want to think about it anymore tonight. Today. Whatever the hell it is.”

  He led her into the bedroom, where he stood gazing forlornly at the huge round bed. “First time in my life I’ve been too tired to take advantage of a bed without corners.”

  “You’ve had a lot of experience in beds like these, Decker?” she asked.

  “Well...” He shrugged. “Not exactly.”

  “How not exactly?”

  He grinned, more of a sheep than a wolf. “Never. Dammit.”

  Sara whisked back the covers. “Good,” she said decisively. “Let’s just climb in, look up at that awful mirror and watch two sleepy people fall asleep.”

  They woke a little after nine, and while Joe showered and shaved, Sara ordered an enormous breakfast. Eggs. Pancakes. Bacon. Hash browns. Rye toast and whole wheat. Orange juice and coffee. If he was going into battle this morning, she didn’t want him to go on an empty stomach.

  But empty stomachs weren’t what she was thinking about when he emerged from the bathroom wearing only a pair of unsnapped, half-zipped jeans that rode low on his hips. Her mind veered toward thoughts of flat stomachs, corrugated abs and powerhouse pecs. She reached for a glass of orange juice to moisten her dry mouth.

  “How many people are you expecting for breakfast?” he asked, eyeing the linen-covered service cart with its array of dishes.

  “I just didn’t want you confronting the Ripper on an empty stomach.”

  He draped the towel around his neck, then picked up a plate and served a good-size portion of everything. “Here,” he said, handing it to her.

  Sara waved her hand. “No, thanks. I’m too nervous to eat. You go ahead.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and joined him at the table by the window. Twenty stories below, traffic was moving at its usual morning crawl. Sara was glad she was far above it all. She sipped her coffee, then asked, “What do you think Captain Cobble will do when you broach the subject of my ID?”

  “I think he’ll laugh his ass off,” he said, working his way through the pile of scrambled eggs and hash browns.

  “Then you don’t believe me.” Her voice sounded more petulant than she had intended, but being a witness that nobody believed was turning out to be more than a little frustrating. It was infuriating, actually. She put her cup on the table with a thump. “Dammit, Decker. Why did you even bother to hide me away here if you don’t think he’s the Ripper?”

  He spent a minute thoughtfully buttering a pancake, ignoring her as well as her question, then he shrugged. “I dunno.” A little gleam shot through his gray eyes when he suggested, “The round bed?”

&nb
sp; “Very funny.”

  “The mirror, then.”

  “Not funny, either.” She slumped in her chair, crossing her arms and glaring at him while he polished off his breakfast, seemingly oblivious of her irritation.

  “Are you going to be okay here by yourself while I’m gone?” he asked, picking up the empty plate and heading toward the service cart. “Cool, I mean? Calm? I know you’ll be safe.”

  “Cool and calm?” she echoed. “Relatively. I suppose I’ll just sit here and twiddle my thumbs while I wonder whether or not the captain puts you up in front of a firing squad after he laughs his ass off.”

  “I’m serious,” he called from the bedroom, from where she could hear the sounds of dressing—the snap of jeans, the clink of a buckle being done, then the inevitable sound of a shoulder holster being tugged in place. “Sara?” he called.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  “Because if you’re worried or anxious, I can have Maggie come stay with you while I’m at the precinct this morning.”

  “No. That’s okay.”

  “Okay.” He was standing in the bedroom doorway, fiddling with his gun before sliding it into the holster under his arm. “I shouldn’t be gone more than a couple of hours at the most.”

  Sara could feel her snit melting. She wasn’t angry at Joe, after all. She was worried about him. It had been a long time since she’d worried about someone other than herself.

  “Be careful,” she said, rising to follow him to the door. “I mean, if I’m right...”

  He looped both arms over her shoulders, bent his head to press his forehead against hers. “If you’re right, I couldn’t be confronting Cobble in a safer place, could I? Hmm?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I guess not.”

  “Keep the door locked and bolted while I’m gone. Don’t let anybody in except Maggie or me. Not even housekeeping.”

  “All right.”

  “And one more thing,” he said.

  “What?”